From the Director’s Desk:
I will be the first to admit it has been a while since I last wrote. What a whirlwind of a summer Wessington Springs has seen. Your Chamber and Economic Development Corporation has been working diligently to make impactful differences in our community.
I was fortunate to receive a scholarship from the Economic Development Professionals Association of South Dakota to attend classes at BHSU this fall. The training was excellent. After 3 years of training in the world of Economic Development, I’m ready to lead my board and community forward in future development ventures and feel I now have the skillset to see success.
Any day now, we hope to close on a new office space on Main Street Wessington Springs. We are very much looking forward to this. We also have acquired the old law office on Main Street across from the grocery store. After having an asbestos study done from the DANR, we have learned that it will indeed be safe to demolish and we hope to redevelop the space so if you have any ideas, please share!
Other successes of the summer are the completion of our Housing Needs Study and our Discover More on Highway 34 campaign. First, the housing study affirmed the need for housing including single family homes, town homes, and duplexes for all income levels and has now opened the doors to access funding options. If you are interested in investing in either project please contact us. (You can view the final draft of the housing study under our Chamber & Development tab on our webpage at wessingtonsprings.com.) Second, Keloland News picked up on our work to promote Highway 34 and did us a HUGE favor with their stories highlighting the project shortly before Sturgis week. Currently, I am working to find more information about the “Buffalo Trail” and hope to join with Fort Pierre Tourism to work together and highlight the highway even further, hopefully increasing tourism throughout the highway. If you have any memories or information regarding that, please contact me.
Our summer events were a Rockin’ good time 😉. We were proud to be a part of the return of the (tamed down version) Leap to Lane’s in Lane, and our annual Foothills Day’s saw our first annual Foothills Days parade, Foothills Classic, as well as some successful golf tournaments. Rockin’ Ribfest served to be an excellent success as a fundraiser for our organization as we were fortunate to welcome Dustin Evans and The Goodtimes band and Surfin Safari to the event. We also enjoyed promoting our local Music in the Garden series and look forward to seeing that event grow. It is a very special thing to be able to showcase homegrown and regional talents. Our community is blessed with some of the very best.
As fall settles, we are looking forward to our community’s new annual Halloween events including the 4-H’s Trunk or Treat, the Chamber Halloween Walk and the recently founded Trail of Fears, spearheaded by our friends Cody and Deanna Hasty. Cody’s passion for all things Halloween has proven to be contagious and has got this director super excited to showcase our Old Grade Trail with some top notch spookiness!
Snow will be here before we know it and with that comes our Winter Park activities we LOVE to showcase. Ice skating and sledding are just around the corner as well as our Annual Hometown Christmas event at the Field House. I have to credit our local Kyle Evan’s Wagon Train group for creating much of the magic we see at that event. We also hope to raise funds to seek some remodeling of the field house.
Last year we began a Trail of Lights in the park. With a handful of displays, it was quite fun to take that drive through the park and see the beautiful lights. We do plan to do this again so be thinking about your display for this year.
As we bring 2021 to a close, we will be hosting our 2nd major fundraiser, Foothills Pheasant Fest December 17 & 18. We enjoy the friendships that have evolved from this competition, appreciate the money the teams bring into the community, and look forward to a good time by all this year.
I will also touch on 2022 memberships. We will be sending the renewals out soon with some changes to the memberships to simplify things. Be watching your mailbox for those next month. Memberships are vital to the success of our organization. We work to market our community as well as local businesses and hope our work becomes impactful enough that we can see increased funding from both our city and county governments. Until then, our budget model relies heavily on our fundraisers and memberships.
I have no doubt I more than likely missed a couple topics, but lastly, I, and my board would like to send a very sincere thank you to those whom have reached out to show your support of our work and purpose in our community over the last year. We appreciate you more than words can ever say. It has been trying at times, but we have persevered and look forward to serving this wonderful community we call home for years to come.
God Bless,
Loree Gaikowski
Executive Director
WS Area Chamber & Development
